What this is about: Watching all of the anime shows so you don’t have to! For more information about me and my reviews, click here for details on what I am reviewing.

Series Premise: Nichijou, or “My Ordinary Life”, is a weekly anime television series that started in April 2011, based on a comedy manga series by Keiichi Arawi. The story follows the everyday life and adventures of a few first-year high school students and the people around them, including an underage professor and her robotic maid, a goat-riding student and his butler, and other quirky characters.

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One of the recurring problems with Nichijou is that they will often drive a joke in the ground, spending a few minutes going over essentially the same joke, over and over again. When it’s a decent gag, that’s fine, if not a bit repetitive. But when it’s a real clunker, it just drags on…and on…and on…………….and on…..

And when that happens two or three times in the same episode, it feels like time has stopped. Just like in the elevator skit in this episode.

But a better analogy would be with the first skit, as the three girls are walking to school, and Yuuko trying her darnedest to tell a joke (often Japanese word pun based) to get the other girls to laugh. But they remain absolutely stone-faced. So Yuuko tries another joke, and another, and another, each time ramping up with a “funnier” joke in her arsenal, and each time Mai and Mio remain impassive as Yuuko’s stupefied reaction gets more and more extreme.

So the analogy is Yuuko is Episode 8, and Mai and Mio are me, the viewer.

The “elevator skit” was equally interminable and un-funny. The go/soccer shorts were lackluster. The “Nano can’t get cavities” bit was not awful, but also not funny. Gun Girl going all ultra-tsundere and blowing up Goat Boy was…well, okay, I guess. Frankly, the most enjoyment I got out of this episode came from watching Mr. Sakamoto chase his own tail for a few seconds.

Yeah, I’m still watching Nichijou. But if I had to watch this dud a second time…I’d give it a pass.

The verdict:

Instead of wasting 20 minutes on this episode, spend 90 seconds watching this English-dubbed Nichijou opening video sequence I learned about yesterday. Hey, don’t go hatin’ on the English language dubbing, folks, don’t be a snob! While I generally find that the subbed versions of anime shows are better, there’s some reasonable and downright decent English voice-acted shows out there as well. Cristina Vee FTW!